The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Shadows of the Damned is a damn fine game, and honestly, it confuses me that it’s gotten so little press. Here you have one of the kings of ridiculous Japanese bullshit, Suda 51, joining forces with the guy who made Resident Evil 4 to create a Suda 51 game that is as silly and awesome as Suda does, but is actually fairly enjoyable to play. And they did it. That’s exactly what Shadows of the Damned is.

It’s also a game where your main weapon is called the Boner, which upgrades into the Hot Boner, which you then use to shoot a “sticky Hot Boner payload.” So, you know, there’s that.

Basically, you’ve got the main character, Garcia Fucking Hotspur. (Yes, his middle name is “Fucking.”) He’s a demon hunter, and he’s off doing his thing, but unfortunately all his demon hunting pisses off Fleming, the main underworld dude. So he kidnaps Garcia’s hot girlfriend, and Garcia has to go to Hell to save her and shoot like a million dudes.

The game basically controls like an improved RE4 or 5. You can shoot while moving, but it really doesn’t affect combat THAT much, as you can’t aim worth shit while you’re aiming and moving so it’s to your benefit to stand still. You get three weapons, a pistol (the Boner I was speaking of), a machine gun (the Teether), and a shotgun (the Skullcussioner). They upgrade themselves throughout the game, with the Teether eventually becoming The Dentist and having homing shots, and the Skullcussioner becoming the Skullblaster and letting you shoot a gigantic grenade skull, but those are basically your weapons. But that’s okay. Those are basically the weapons you’d be using in a game like this anyway! Plus, you still have some upgrade fun with the red gems you get, which you can use to upgrade each weapon how you see fit, so the game isn’t completely devoid of getting better weaponry.

Really, though, the game is sold by the tone the game sets. It makes terrible, terrible dick jokes all the way through, but not only do you believe these are the sorts of people who would be making such terrible jokes but you also feel like they’re just incredibly appropriate for running through this version of hell. Everyone isn’t spouting out jokes. You totally believe in them saying what they’re saying. It’s awesome that way.
The reason you buy it is because the voice actors for Garcia and Johnson, the talking skull who becomes all your weaponry, are both fantastic. They sell every fucking ridiculous line. Listening to them is the key joy of the game. There are even these children’s storybooks about the origins the bosses, and they read them out loud to each other, and comment on them. There’s no action during these. They’re just reading. But it says so much about both characters and they’re so entertaining, you don’t even care that you’re listening to a storybook. (And if you do care, they are completely optional.) Seriously, hearing Garcia chuckle at the parts where people get killed, because that’s the funny part, is completely accurate to his character and grin-inducing.

There are some parts of the game involving the damaging darkness mechanic that get a bit annoying, sure. I’m also really annoyed at the achievements. There are achievements for getting certain numbers of kills with each version of each gun, but in the beginning, they’re all pretty awful, and it makes sense to stick with the Boner. Since you can’t downgrade them, you’re just shit out of luck. It also doesn’t do the thing where it gives you the lower difficulty achievements for beating it on higher settings, so while I beat it on Normal, I’d have to beat it again on Easy to get that achievement. None of these are a good reason to keep yourself from playing a fun and funny game. It’s entertaining and kept a smile on my face the whole time. Suda deserves your money for his brand of crazy. If you like RE4 and penises at all, you should give this a go.

I’m going to see Ok Go in concert on the 4th, apparently! So I thought I should listen to their newest album, because I still haven’t.

I was kind of disappointed.

It really seemed like they were going back to what they did with their first, self-titled album. Which is cool, I suppose, but I also don’t like most of that album. Oh No was filled with tons of seriously ROKKIN’ tracks, and Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky just doesn’t have a lot of those.

Except White Knuckles, which I have listened to constantly. (For the record, I also like WTF?)

Not only is it just an exciting piece of music (with a cute as shit music video) but the lyrics also just seems to really fit my current situation. I mean, check this shit out.

“And you can’t go back, the way you came. Round all the pieces up, but they just don’t fit the same. White knuckles. Maybe it’s not so bad.”
“So just have fun, it’s far enough. Everybody needs to sleep at night, everybody needs a crutch. But couldn’t good, be good enough? Cause nothin’ ever doesn’t change but nothin’ changes much.”

I don’t know. I like a good rocking song, but lyrics? I’m a fucking poet. Lyrics speak to me. This may not be the super-deepest song in the world, but when I’m trying to both turn my world upside down and not lose anything from how my life was before? Well, this kind of shit is important to keep in mind. Nothing ever doesn’t change, but nothing changes much. Quite a nice little line.

Anyway, I’ll just listen to White Knuckles a few hundred more times. You all have a fun day.

Oh fuck, Tiny Tower.

Tiny Tower came out, and I have been playing this bullshit NONSTOP. It’s so fantastic, and free, and you should get it.

Basically, Tiny Tower is Sim Tower meets Farmville. That makes it sound not great, but it’s better than that.

I’ve never played Farmville, but here’s what I know as the bad parts of Farmville: it constantly hassles your Facebook friends, and if you don’t constantly check in, you not only don’t gain benefits, but lose the work you’ve done. To be efficient, you have to pay money, as well. Lots of money.

Tiny Tower doesn’t do that.

The only real interaction with your friends is that you can look at their towers and compare them. That’s cool, and no hassle involved. While you do gain benefits by constantly checking in and restocking your businesses, if you let it set for an hour, a day, a week, you don’t lose the progress you’ve made. What you’ve stocked doesn’t go “bad.” You just aren’t slowly accumulating wealth. When you come back and play again, nothing will be fucked up. Also, there are plenty of ways in-game to earn “Tower Bux,” which is the for-pay currency. It makes it so you can’t do every single thing without paying, but if you prioritize, you can do some of the stuff you’d like. It makes it so the game is fun without paying money, which is really a flaw of a lot of these sorts of social games that I’ve seen.

Really, though, the game has a lot of style. It has a pixel aesthetic that works, and isn’t just used for nostalgia’s sake. It’s exciting to see what crazy new businesses you’re going to open, as you don’t get to choose. You just pick between 5 areas: Food, Retail, Service, Creative, and Recreation, and the game builds you one at random. You may get a bar, if you build a Food place, or you may get a Frozen Yogurt shop.
You can earn extra Tower Bux and get bonuses if you put the various “Bitzens” into their dream jobs, as well, though you have to build apartment floors for them to stay in so they can work in your building too. They all have stats relating to the five different types of businesses: put more skilled people into jobs they like, and they restock and sell product faster, so you can build more floors, so you can build more businesses, so you can make more money to build more floors, and so on.

It’s addicting seeing your little empire build up, and after you get going, there’s very little maintenance, just a few button presses here and there, with sporadic decision-making moments of who to employ where and what to build next. You are constantly checking in, if you want things to build quickly, but you don’t have to.

I love it. It crashes whenever I open the game outside of wifi, because it can’t connect to Game Center, but other than that? Awesome. Way better than their previous game, Pocket Frogs, and Pocket Frogs is pretty sweet. If you don’t hate this sort of game in general, at least give this one a try. It’s a fun time. Also, add me and let me see your tower. I’m poetfox. I have a paintball course on like floor 16.

Words with Friends was all like “We have a new game called Hanging with Friends!” And I’m like, “Words with Friends people, I dislike that Zynga bought you, but you’re still like, one of if not the best multiplayer game on iOS. I will try your game.”

So I did.
It’s kind of a buggy mess.

The game itself is solid design. It uses the same asynchronous multiplayer sort of style that makes Words with Friends so fun. Basically, you’re playing Hangman that way. Only, if course, people aren’t being hanged. They’re holding balloons that pop. But still. Basically, you draw a bunch of Words with Friends tiles, and build a word. Your score for the word goes into a meter that fills up. When you fill it up, you earn 20 coins! In any case, you then send your word off. Your friend gets the word, and tries to guess it, Hangman style, with number of guesses based on the size of the word, (More letters equals less guesses) with the last vowel in the word always automatically revealed. If they fail, they lose a balloon. If they win, they don’t. Either way, they send you a word. It keeps going back and forth until someone loses all 5 balloons.

For each round, you get 3 hints you can use. “Suspects” highlights four letters, one of which must be in the word. This is by far the most useful. “Extinguisher” labels 4 letters that aren’t in the word for you. This rarely hits the letters you are thinking of picking, and tends to not be useful. “Revive” essentially gives you one extra guess, as it “undoes” one wrong guess. You get one free use of these a round, but can “buy” additional uses for 20 coins.

Buying those uses is the one thing that seems a bit silly, though. It just seems like it would be worth your time to play a lot of games with randoms that you aren’t trying to win to build up coins to win the games you care about. Of course, this will be mitigated once they get the coin store in the game, where I assume you’ll be able to trade all these coins I’ve been stockpiling for little avatar things and whatnot. That’s what I hope anyway. I don’t get the coin thing.

The real problem with the game, though, is how glitchy it is. There are serious bugs in the game as it is. You press buttons, and nothing happens. You ask the game to show you what another player does, and stuff just doesn’t show up on the screen. It’s even stuff like your little avatars showing the “happy” expression when something bad happens. It’s really silly. I mean, clearly, they’ll patch it at some point, but it’s on the verge of unplayable at the moment, which is a shame.

Eventually, this game will be great. Hangman is a much more even playing field game. It’s fun regardless of skill level, whereas I can see some people being turned off to being utterly crushed in Scrabble, as I am over and over with some people I play Words with Friends with. Still, it’s got a free version. It may be worth your time to try. But maybe wait until they patch it once.

Cole had this party celebrating the day of his birth, but I didn’t go. Reason one was because I had to work. Reason two was because it was taking place at a location described in the invitation as “Bro Air.” Anyway, so the day after, he invites me to go see Green Lantern, so of course I say sure. Cause, you know, birthday.

Green Lantern is not a very good film.

Basically, the movie kind of has one of the main problems with the Transformers movies: you’re watching amazing action, but it’s nonsensical. In Transformers, one CG metal blob is fighting another CG metal blob. They all look the same because of the terrible art direction. There’s no real way to tell what’s going on. Similarly, in Green Lantern, you’ve got Green Blobs being shot at Yellow Blobs. This is not interesting to watch.
Even if you found that interesting to watch, there’s maybe, what, 3 fight scenes in the whole movie? Okay, four, but one of them is a training montage. Sadly, this training montage is, by far, the most interesting combat in the film to watch. People are manifesting all kinds of crazy shit and attacking each other! This is what Green Lantern is all about! But when it comes to fight the big bad, it’s mostly just firing green blobs of energy at him, while he fires yellow lasers. Ho hum.

Outside of these situations, you have a lot of stuff that doesn’t work. Van Wilder plays Green Lantern, and he’s a dude, certainly. He tries to be charming and funny. He’s trying his best! He’s given nothing to work with, though. His character is flat, and his supporting cast is one-dimensional. What’s worse, the movie wastes so much time attempting to establish this scientist man as a likable figure, before turning him into a bad guy who does things that make no sense. So that’s fantastic. Green Lantern needs a villain to fight, but he has an amorphous blob of questionable motivation and a mutated scientist who is turning into a grotesque Professor X, and who had motivations, but basically completely forgets them after meeting Green Lantern. Awesome.

I also saw it in 3D. Every time I see a 3D movie, I wish I hadn’t. This is no exception.

This movie is attempting to be comedic and badass, and really kind of fails at both. It’s really just going through the motions. I will admit this movie taught me more about Green Lantern’s backstory than I knew before. So I guess that is indeed something. But yeah, this isn’t a movie to see. Don’t see this movie. Surely there’s something better out there to watch.

Here’s my mood right now. In, you know, a progressive mixtape of songs linked on youtube. If you listen through it all, let me know. That’s cool of you. If not, well, no worries. Hopefully my mood will not be shit tomorrow, and I’ll write something.

Alternia from Homestuck’s AlterniaBound soundtrack

Hopeless Bleak Despair by They Might Be Giants

Failure by My Robot Friend

Un Dia by Juana Molina

Want It All Back from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack

Grace and Glory from the Jet Set Radio soundtrack

Advice [FLCL Arrange Version] by The Pillows

Skies of Skaia from Homestuck Vol. 1

Three Minutes Clapping from The World Ends With You

Up to the Roof by Blue Man Group

It’s Getting Better (Man!!) by Oasis

When Life Gives Me Lemons I Make Lemonade by The Boy Least Likely To

Fear (Rez Version) by Adam Freeland

Killed by BR8K Spider!!!!!!!! from Homestuck’s AlterniaBound soundtrack

Rage was one of those iOS games that people wouldn’t shut up about how pretty it looked. “Man, it’s like a real game!” they said. The last game they said that about was Infinity Blade, which I scoffed at, until I played it, and then I had a decent amount of fun. So, you know, Rage was a dollar so I decided to try that too. Why not, right?

Rage is certainly a game.

Well, okay, I will say this about Rage. It proved to me that motion controls for a shooter actually work on iOS. I would have never thought it! But I turned it on to try it, and it actually seems like a legit way to play. After you get used to it, it makes whipping around quickly to hit multiple targets way easier than using a virtual thumbstick on the screen. It’s totally something you have to get used to, but I understand now why people would want it as an option.

Now the game that you play that way? Mm.

Rage is essentially a light gun game. You have several stages that your character walks through without you really controlling where he goes. You shoot at mutant to kill them, while picking up bonus money, health, and ammo. You can also shoot targets for more money, and dodge rocks enemies throw at you with a dodge button. You go for high score, and that’s about it, though I suppose there is a bit of a challenge surviving all the way through a level your first go-round on not-easy.

There’s definitely a little bit of finesse, I suppose. You have three weapons: a shitty pistol that has unlimited ammo, an assault rifle that looks like an AK-47 that can fire fast but only has marginally more punch than the pistol, and a shotgun that reloads slow as fuck but can kill most enemies in one shot, especially if it’s to the head. You have to balance finding ammo with shooting, and not go all trigger happy, because the pistol is not great to be stuck with. I actually started starting some runs out using the pistol, just to build up a surplus of ammunition for the other guns before I started really getting swarmed near the end.

Still, in the end, it’s kind of a light gun game without the visceral, fun feel of having a light gun in your hand while you play. Which does make it lose something. There’s also this announcer guy who they obviously think is supposed to be funny or endearing but really kind of falls flat, as far as I’m concerned. He’s like Mad Moxxie, but much less cool. I kind of wished he’d shut up after awhile, and then I remembered I could mute my iPad! So there’s that.

Anyway, it is a nice showpiece for how pretty 3D graphics on iOS can be, but it’s really just a little high score game to build hype for Rage. Which is weird, since who knows when that will be out and Rage has been out on iOS for awhile now. If you’re desperate to shoot things on iOS, I suppose there are probably worst uses for your dollar, but I wasn’t too impressed with it. Once I saw all the areas, I was kind of done.

Some people on Talking Time were talking about Tiny Tower, a game coming out, and they were like “I’m so excited and it will be good because it’s by the people who made Pocket Frogs.” That video looked good, and I had seen Pocket Frogs a lot on the iTunes store, and it cost nothing, so I gave it a download.

Holy shit, Pocket Frogs.

Pocket Frogs is basically frog-based Viva Pinata, only a bit more straightforward. You get frogs of different patterns. By breeding them, you create more frogs. You can breed two frogs together that you have tamed and are in your frog habitats, or you can go hunting for frogs in the Pond minigame and sex them up. New frogs are born, and you can mate them, or sell them for coins. You buy new habitats for your frogs, special breeds to play with, and decorations. As you breed more frogs, you level up, and unlock more complex frog types. You can play little minigames with your frogs to make them happy, if you want, and win prizes. Mostly, though, you’re trying to breed expensive frogs to sell for capital, and frogs to match up with daily challenges and so forth in the game.

The deal is that it’s microtransaction based. You can buy stamps to make items you buy or send to friends show up faster, or potions to make your frogs mature and be happy faster. If you don’t do that, everything takes a set amount of time to happen.

Personally, I love that you have to wait. It makes the game a very low time investment. I check on my frogs like once or twice a day to breed some new ones, make some money, and so forth, and then I don’t have to worry about it. Things don’t go bad if you don’t check in. There’s no punishment for playing slow. It actually kind of rewards you for it, because you aren’t pressed to spend money. It’s pretty fantastic in that way. It’s a complete game without spending tons of cash. I love that. That’s smart microtransaction design, and I appreciate it.

It’s free, and it can be a timesink if you really, really want to maximize the value on all your frogs. (I don’t.) But it’s really cute, and a great time without spending any money. I’m poetfox on Plus+. Friend me and send me a frog or something! I’m really enjoying it, and it really makes me look forward to Tiny Tower, to be sure.

Crysis 2 is a game with guns. You fire these guns at both humans and aliens, and then they die.

Crysis 2 is a mediocre game.

There are a lot of things about Crysis 2 that are alright. The controls are solid, and the guns, for the most part, have a fantastic feel to them, something a lot of games get wrong. Even the wussiest pistol feels cool to shoot in the game, and that is to the game’s credit. Sneaking around with the stealth on is fairly easy, and can make you feel fairly powerful, though you do have to try or you will get caught. The first few wide open areas you get into are kind of cool. The game realistically keeps one in the chamber if you reload early, which was a shock when I realized it and a nice touch. It’s very pretty to look at.

I think that’s about all I thought was solid about the game.

There are two main problems with the game. One is the encounters. The combat encounters in this game get stale fast. You are a fairly powerful individual, as you should be, since you’re in a powersuit, and the designers quickly realized they had no good way to challenge you. Thus, enemies start being able to sap your suit energy, either through SMGs that fire ELECTRIC BULLETS or a little EMP shockwave that some of the larger tanks have. The SMGs are just annoying, but they do take away what makes the game feel unique, which just feels kind of stupid of them to do. The EMP shockwave on the alien tanks is just a huge clusterfuck. You have to sneak behind the big tanks to do any damage. (You can deal more damage to all aliens by getting them from behind, but for the big tanks, it’s required, not just a good idea to move forward quickly.) To sneak behind them, you must stealth. But they can knock you out of stealth with that EMP blast whenever they feel like it. It’s really, really frustrating. The “tank” enemies, heavily armored aliens, are also annoying because they just take so much ammunition to kill. It’s ridiculous. After about the halfway point of the game, Crysis 2 is throwing these enemy types at you CONSTANTLY, attempting desperately to make a combat scenario interesting. When it’s not doing that, it’s setting you up for stealth kills on a ledge, but once you snipe everyone and jump down, it spawns a million guys, making your stealth useless. It’s frustrating.

The other main problem is the plot. Now, it’s a shoot-guys game, so plot isn’t important, but goodness, it shoves it down your throat. I could live with that if it wasn’t so stupid. Your character has no connection to anyone in the story being told. He knows no backstory, and it’s never explained why things are happening. He’s just there, going through multiple MGS4 Microwave sequences because people he doesn’t know are telling him to in his ear. These people in your ear betray each other, and keep switching around, but it means nothing, because you never really understood what any of them were trying to do, so you have no investment in who is giving you commands. One minute, the marines are helping you. The next, they’re shooting you. Why? The game certainly doesn’t do a very good job of attempting to explain it. I guess there’s one bad marine? I think I kicked him out a window. I have no idea. Again, either let the story go away, or make it interesting. Don’t shove it down my throat and then make it not make any sense. From what I’ve heard, the story is still completely disconnected if you had played Crysis. It’s insane.

Both of these things are bad, but when you add it to the fact that this game is easily too long, you have a recipe for mediocrity. From about the halfway point on, I kept thinking “this game doesn’t have anything else to show me, I must be in the endgame,” but I wasn’t. It just kept going, and spawning more and more horrible encounters and having more and more cutscenes that were completely disconnected from everything. Bleh.

The base mechanics are fine, and the game looks pretty gorgeous, but it does so many things wrong and, at the end of the day, having a button that makes me as invulnerable as I normally am in a video game doesn’t actually make you feel badass, it turns out. Give it a rent like I did, if you want to try it, but I don’t really understand who would truly enjoy this game. At best, it’s a passable shooter that’s pretty.

When you read a name like DEATH RALLY, well, you assume you will have DEATH and also RALLY. You also assume you’ll have an experience that is EXTREME, or X-TREME if you prefer.

I don’t know how X-TREME it really is, but it’s not too bad of a game.

There’s some comic-book style story when you start the game. It’s got good production values, but for the most part, you’re just racing, so it’s not really important. Still, it sets the tone for the game as being an incredibly polished and flashy-looking game for the platform. This is a top-down racer, like, say, RC-Pro-Am or, say, Rally King. Something along those lines. Of course, this is a DEATH RALLY so you’ve got a car equipped with guns and various other weapons, and can simply explode other racers instead of out-race them.

Frankly, I really appreciate the controls in this game. They realized how frustrating it would be to have a gas button on the touch screen, so instead they have a fairly large virtual analog stick that does gas based on how far you move the stick to the edges of it. It works way better than having a gas button, especially with this sort of top-down game. There’s also a big button to fire your weapons, but that button is only for your special weapons. Your basic machine gun always fires if there’s something vaguely interesting in front of you, so you’re never having to hold down the button. That’s just smart. There’s also two different camera modes. I find camera mode two, which keeps the orientation of your car set and rotates the track, to be WAY more usable than the default, which keeps the camera angle on the track set, but maybe it’s different for different people and I appreciate having the option.

In each race, there is a bunch of other racers, one of which is the “boss” who is likely going to win and who is hard to kill. You get money based on how many people you kill, where you place, and whether or not you took out the boss during the race. You can use this money to repair your car (which is never very expensive, so you’ll never be able to NOT repair your car, even if you get last place) and upgrade things such as your car’s armor, handling, and top speed. You can also upgrade the various weapons on your cars. These special weapons can be moved between cars, but things such as armor enhancements are on a per-car basis, so if you’re planning on doing a lot of car-hopping, it may be better to focus on your weapons first. In general, I find it extremely hard to win races just racing. I’ve done much better trying to explode all the competition so that I’m second place by default, because there’s only two cars left alive. Still, sometimes in spite of myself, I drive really well and win without much carnage. I suppose it’s good the game gives you the option to do things either way.

While you drive, you pick up “parts” of additional courses, cars, and weapons, which eventually unlock as you collect them. The game also has a big meter of your overall completion collecting all this shit on the main menu, so you know how much there is to unlock. There aren’t a ton of courses, but there are a decent amount, and the game uses mirrored versions of them all as well, for more variety. The developers have also put out tons of free updates with more new cars and courses to unlock over the life of the game. Since I bought it, they’ve put out at least one major update, and I know there have been several in the past before I bought it on sale, so that’s awesome that it’s being supported.

If you like those sorts of old-school, top down racers, Death Rally is an easy sell. It’s really polished and a lot of fun. I’m not sure if it’s worth the premium otherwise. It does eventually devolve into doing the same sorts of races over and over to collect more parts and money to upgrade again and again, which is fun in its way, but it doesn’t feel like it’s for any real purpose, just generic completion’s sake, which doesn’t engage me for too long. Still, it was totally worth the dollar I paid for it at the time. I’ve enjoyed myself.